Weekend tech reading: The man behind Bitcoin

The ghosts of Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto doesn't exist. Or, at least, if he does, he's one of the rare modern individuals who is practically impossible to locate. Nakamoto is the creator of Bitcoin. Over the years since the virtual currency's inception, there have been several quixotic expeditions to find him. Some have been more thorough than others. Investigators have alternately concluded that he (for the sake of argument) is either an economic sociologist from Finland, an American financial speculator, a student in Dublin or a confabulation of one or more computer scientists. Polygon

Ashes to ashes, peer to peer: an oral history of Napster Like the birth of most great music movements -- Elvis on Ed Sullivan, Patti Smith at CBGB -- Napster was rebellious of convention, threatening to established norms, and, well, really loud. The tiny startup from Hull, Mass. launched in early-1999, grabbing the world's attention almost immediately. At its core was a clever-if-crude piece of software -- so-called peer-to-peer technology -- that allowed computers to easily send each other files over a network. It would transform the Internet into a maelstrom, definitively proving the web's power to create and obliterate value. Fortune

All LinkedIn with nowhere to go In a jobs economy that has become something of a grim joke, nothing seems quite so bleak as the digital job seeker’s all-but-obligatory LinkedIn account. In the decade since the site launched publicly with a mission "to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful," the glorified résumé-distribution service has become an essential stop for the professionally dissatisfied masses. The networking site burrows its way into users' inboxes with updates spinning the gossamer dream of successful and frictionless advancement up the career ladder. The Baffler

Analyzing the price of mobility: desktops vs. laptops Computers have been getting faster over the years, and with the increased performance we eventually passed the point where most systems were "fast enough" and the various features and use cases became more important. It used to be that to get similar performance to a desktop, a laptop would generally cost two or even three times as much -- and even then, sometimes it was simply impossible to match desktop performance with a laptop. Has that changed with the era of "fast enough" computing? AnandTech

Random access memories: my time at a singularity conference I'm sitting in the far left corner of Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall in New York, in a dark spot under the balcony, watching a man who is not a man. On the brightly lit stage, the man sits comfortably in an Aeron desk chair, hair falling into his eyes as he gazes idly about the room through glasses, hands in lap. The emcee of the Global Future 2045 conference, Phil VanNedervelde, introduces him as Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro, director of the Intelligence Robotics Laboratory in Osaka, Japan. He's a leading expert in the creation of lifelike robots. Ars Technica

Why cards are the future of the web We are currently witnessing a re-architecture of the web, away from pages and destinations, towards completely personalised experiences built on an aggregation of many individual pieces of content. Content being broken down into individual components and re-aggregated is the result of the rise of mobile technologies, billions of screens of all shapes and sizes, and unprecedented access to data from all kinds of sources through APIs and SDKs. Inside Intercom

Collect them all If it’s true that whoever dies with the most toys wins, then Brett Martin is in the pole position. The Guinness Book Of World Records recently made it official, certifying his collection of video game memorabilia as the world’s largest. The Coloradan stay-at-home dad has amassed 10,000 pieces worth an estimated $110,000, including everything from the kind of posters you used to find in gaming magazines to oddities like Mario-licensed power tools. The Gameological Society

In the dark What I remember first about that year is the darkness of the nights. We would pile into a car and if we all had late enough curfews we would drive out of town, past the last light, on some country road we didn't know the name of, fields and stars as far as we could see. When there was a lightning storm on the plains we'd drive toward it, watching moon-colored omens craze across the sky; otherwise light was what instinct led us to avoid. Grantland

How to crack Cobalt Strike AND backdoor it You know you've made it (somewhere?) as a software developer, when people pirate your stuff. From various searches, I see that several "cracked" versions of the Cobalt Strike trial exist. Since there's interest in pirating Cobalt Strike, I'd like to speculate about which steps I would take to crack the Cobalt Strike trial and add a backdoor to it, prior to distribution on an unofficial site. Strategic Cyber

The Road to Battlefield 4: our deepest and most personal weapon customization ever Whether you help your team by sniping from afar or run and gun with an assault rifle at the frontlines, choice is king. Weapon customization in Battlefield 4 will be deeper than ever, thanks to a powerful feature set that lets you adapt your gear to fit any combat role. In a new The Road to Battlefield 4 we cover these extreme customization options. EA

How smart can a watch really be? The watch, as we have known it for the past several centuries, is designed to provide a single piece of information at a glance, as unobtrusively as possible. It might also notify its wearer of an important moment, with an alarm, or perhaps function as a timer or a stopwatch. But you don’t really do anything to or with a watch. They’re passive devices, and they work pretty well that way. The New Yorker

NSA can spy on smart phone data The United States' National Security Agency intelligence-gathering operation is capable of accessing user data from smart phones from all leading manufacturers. Top secret NSA documents that Spiegel has seen explicitly note that the NSA can tap into such information on Apple iPhones, BlackBerry devices and Google's Android mobile operating system. Spiegel